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"Now that their boss, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, has finally shaken hands with Russia's Vladimir Putin, the staff running the lone Russian factory in Poroshenko's chocolate empire can finally see better days ahead.

Since March, when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula and pro-Russian rebels rose up in eastern Ukraine, the Lipetsk Confectionary Factory has been raided by armed police, boycotted and accused by Russian politicians of supporting extremism.

Its accounts were frozen, its books combed over by the tax authorities and its directors repeatedly interrogated and threatened with jail for conspiring to profit off chocolate illegally named for a songbird."

"Crossing the dividing line from the Greek Republic of Cyprus to Turkish-backed Northern Cyprus is simple enough. Past the crossing point on Ledra Street, churches give way to mosques, Starbucks and designer fashion shops to Ottoman caravanserais and family tailors. But this frontier, which presents no impediment to tourists, has so far been an impassable barrier to gas.

In late September, a drill-ship contracted to Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas arrived to start drilling south-east of Cyprus, adjacent to the Israeli maritime border. It was shadowed by a Turkish navy corvette, as Turkey considers these waters disputed, a reminder of the island’s drawn-out division. But none of the contenders for the Eastern Mediterranean’s gas – Israel, Lebanon and Egypt being the others – has an easy route to wealth.

When a consortium led by US-based Noble Energy found a giant gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean in 2009 and 2010, Turkey – Europe’s fourth largest gas market, and a route to the EU – seemed the obvious export market. But with no resolution to the division of Cyprus in view, and the island lying firmly in the way of any pipeline route, Cyprus and Israel have had to look elsewhere for buyers."